by Philip Roth
Zuckerman understood none of this—only that his head was getting larger and was about to roll off. Bobby repeated the story: “You were out on the heath with King Lear. You keeled over. Face forward, straight out, onto my Uncle Paul’s footstone. My father says it sounded like a rock hitting the pavement. He thought you’d had a heart attack. You took the impact on the point of your chin. Burst the skin. Your two front teeth snapped just below the gum line. When they picked you up. you came around for a few seconds, completely came to, and said, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got to get rid of some teeth.” You spat the bits of teeth into your hand, then blacked out again. Doesn’t look to be a fracture, no intracranial bleeding, but let’s be sure of everything before we take the next step. It’ll hurt for a while, but you’re going to be fine.”
The gloved fist that was Zuckerman’s tongue went off in search of his front teeth. The tongue found instead their spongy gritty sockets. Otherwise, within his head, he felt giddy, echoing, black.
Patiently, Bobby tried a third explanation. “You were at the cemetery. Remember that? You took my father to visit my mother’s grave. You turned up in a car about nine-thirty this morning. It’s now three. You drove out to the cemetery, the driver parked by the embankment, and you and my father went in. He got a little overwrought from the sound of it. So did you. You don’t remember any of this? You went a little haywire, Zuck. At first my old man thought it was a fit. The driver was a woman. Strong as a little ox. You apparently tried to knock her down. That’s when you fell. She’s the one who carried you out.”
Zuckerman indicated, by a dim croak, that he still didn’t remember a thing. All this damage had happened and he didn’t know how. His jaw wouldn’t come undone to allow him to speak. Also his neck had begun stiffening up. He couldn’t move his head at all. Imprisonment complete.
“A little temporary amnesia, that’s all. Don’t panic. Not from the fall. No brain injury, I’m sure. It’s from the stuff you were on. People have these blackouts, especially if there’s a lot of alcohol involved. I’m not surprised to hear that you lost your manners with the lady. They went through your pockets. Three joints, about twenty Percodan tablets, and a beautiful monogrammed Tiffany flask completely emptied of NZ’s booze. You’ve been flying for quite some time. The driver had some story you’d given her all about you and Hugh Hefner. Is this what is known as irresponsible hedonism, some sort of recreational thing, or is it a form of self-treatment for something?”
He discovered an intravenous tube in his right arm. He felt himself beginning to inch back from some black place of which he knew nothing. With the index finger of the free hand he traced the letter “P” in the air. The fingers worked, the arm worked; he tested the legs and the toes. They worked. Below his collarbone he was completely alive, but he himself had become his mouth. He had turned from a neck and shoulders and arms into a mouth. In that hole was his being.
“You were treating pain with all this stuff.”
Zuckerman managed to grunt—and tasted his own blood. He’d progressed from vodka to blood.
“Show me where it hurts. I don’t mean the mouth. The pain you were treating on your own, before the morning’s fun began.”
Zuckerman pointed.
“Diagnosis?” asked Bobby. “Write down the diagnosis. In that book.”
There was a pad on the bed beside him, a large spiral note pad and a felt-tipped Magic Marker. Bobby uncapped the Magic Marker for him and put it into Zuckerman’s hand. “Don’t try to speak. It’ll hurt too much. No talking, no yawning, no eating, no laughing, and try not to sneeze—not for a while yet. Write for me, Zuck. You know how to do that.”
He wrote a word: NONE.
“No diagnosis’? How long has this been going on? Write that down.”
He preferred to show him the number with his fingers—to prove again that the fingers could move and that he awoke he could count and that his head hadn’t rolled away.
“Eighteen,” said Bobby. “Hours, days, months, or years?”
In the air, with the tip of the marker, Zuckerman formed an “M.”
“That’s a little too long to suit me,” Bobby said. “If you’ve had pain for eighteen months, something’s causing it.”
The sensation of being brainless continued to lift. He still couldn’t remember what had happened, but for the moment he didn’t give a fuck: all he understood was that he was in trouble and it hurt. It had become excruciating.
Meanwhile, he gave off a harsh, growling sound: yes (the growl was intended to suggest), more than likely something is causing it.
“Well, you’re not leaving here till we find what it is.”
Zuckerman snorted, downing in the process a second shot of old blood.
“Oh, you’ve made the medical rounds, have you?”
With one finger Zuckerman indicated that he’d been round and round again. He was getting sardonic. Angry. Furious. I did this to myself too! Forcing the world to pay attention to my moan!
“Well, that’s over. We’re going to put you through a multi-disciplinary examination right here in the hospital, we’re going to track it down, and then we’re going to get rid of it for you.”
Zuckerman had a clear compound thought, his first since the morning. Since leaving New York. Maybe in eighteen months. He thought: The doctors are all confidence, the pornographers are all confidence, and, needless to say, the oxlike young women who now drive the limousines live far beyond the reach of doubt. While doubt is half a writer’s life. Two-thirds. Nine-tenths. Another day, another doubt. The only thing I never doubted was the doubt.
“We’re also going to get you off the medication merry-go-round. As long as you’re not on it for kicks, we can break your habit easily enough. Medical addiction, no real problem. As soon as your mouth is fixed and the trauma subsides, we’re going to phase you out of all your pain-killers and away from the alcohol. The grass too. That’s really childish. You’re going to stay here as my patient until you’re no longer addicted. That means three weeks at least. There’s to be no cheating, Zuck. The cure for alcoholism isn’t two little martinis before dinner. We’re going to eliminate the drugs and the drink and we’re going to do our best to find the cause and eliminate the pain that causes the need to get blotto. Is this clear? I’m going to oversee your withdrawal myself. It’ll be gradual and painless, and if you cooperate and don’t cheat, it’ll be lasting. You’ll be back where you were before it all began. I wish you’d told me you were in this when I saw you yesterday. I’m not going to ask why you didn’t. We’ll save that. I thought something was up, you looked so God damned gaga, but you said no, and it just didn’t occur to me in my office, Zuckerman, to look you over for needle tracks. Are you in bad pain right now? From the mouth?”
Zuckerman indicated that he was indeed in pain.
“Well, we’re just waiting for the plastic surgeon. We’re still in emergency. He’ll come down and trim up the wound and get all the grit out and stitch you up so there’s hardly a scar. I want him doing it so that afterwards it looks right. Then we’ll get some pictures. If your mouth needs work right away, we’ll get the jaw man down. He knows you’re here. If they have to wire anything together, he’s the best. He’s the guy who wrote the book. I’ll stay with you all the way—but one thing at a time. I can’t give you anything for the pain right now, not after what you’ve come off of. Don’t want more ‘fits.’ Just go with it. Ride it out. It’ll end like everything else. The whole thing won’t be the shortest journey imaginable, but it won’t last forever either.” Zuckerman found the Magic Marker and, with fingers as awkward as a first-grader’s, wrote four words in the spiral notebook: CAN’T STAY THREE WEEKS.
“No? Why not?”
CLASSES BEGIN JAN. 4.
Bobby tore out the sheet, folded it in half, and stuck it in the pocket of his smock. He rubbed the edge of his hand slowly back and forth across his bearded chin—clinical detachment—but his eyes, examining the patient, showed only exasperation.
He is thinking—thought Zuckerman—”What’s become of this guy?”
A doctor named Walsh appeared in Zuckerman’s cubicle, how long after Bobby left Zuckerman had no way of telling. He was a tall, bony man in his fifties, with a long, pouchy, haggard face, wispy gray hair, and a smoker’s hoarse catch in his voice. He sucked continuously at a cigarette as he spoke. “Welt,” he said to Zuckerman, with a disconcerting smile, “we see thirty thousand people a year down here, but you’re the first I know of to cross the threshold in his lady chauffeur’s arms.”
Zuckerman wrote on a clean notebook page: WHEN HE IS SICK EVERY MAN NEEDS A MOTHER.
Walsh shrugged. “The hoi polloi generally crawl through on their knees or roll in comatose on the stretcher. Especially hop-heads like yourself. The lady says you gave a real fine show before you left for the Land of Oz. Sounds like you were nice and wacky. What all were you on?”
WHAT YOU FOUND. PERCODAN VODKA POT. KILLING PAIN.
“Yep, that’ll do it. If it’s your maiden voyage, three or four tablets of Percodan, a couple highballs, and if you don’t have much tolerance, you’re out for the count. People start ovenreat-ing pain, and next thing they either set fire to the mattress or they’re under the wheels of a bus. We had a guy in here the other night, smashed like you and feelin’ groovy, whammo, ass over skull down four flights. Only thing he didn’t break was his teeth. You got off lucky. For a straight fall like yours you could have done worse. You could have brained yourself but good. You could have bitten off your God damn tongue.”
HOW FAR GONE WAS I?
‘’Oh, you were zonked, bud. You weren’t breathing very hard, you’d thrown up all over yourself, and your face was a mess, We drew some blood to see what you had in you, we passed a tube down your stomach to wash you out, we injected a narcotic antagonist, we got you breathing and hooked up to the IV. We’re waiting for the surgeon to come down. We cleaned out the wound but he’s going to have to stick you together if you still want to turn on the girls.”
WHAT’S IT LIKE TO BE AN EMERGENCY-ROOM DOCTOR? NEVER KNOW WHAT’S COMING THROUGH THE DOOR. CALLS FOR QUICK THINKING. LOTS OF SKILLS.
The doctor laughed. “You writing a book or what?” He had a funny, honking sort of laugh and a vast array of jittery gestures. A doctor with doubts. There had to be one somewhere, You might have taken him for the orderly—or for a psychiatric patient. His eyes looked scared to death. “I never read anything, but the nurse knew who you were. Before you get out of here, she’s going to get your autograph. She says we got a celebrity here.”
QUESTION SERIOUS. He was trying to think of something other than the ear-to-ear pain, ABOUT TO ENTER MEDICAL SCHOOL.
EMERGENCY-ROOM MEDICINE REWARDING?
“Well, it’s a God damn tough way to earn a living, if you want to know. Average guy bums out at this job in about seven years. But I don’t know what you mean, entering medical school. You’re the famous writer. You wrote the dirty book.”
MUST SAVE LOTS OF LIVES. MUST MAKE THE HARD WORK WORTH IT.
“I suppose. Sure there are two or three cliff-hangers in a day. People come in here on the rack and you try to do something for them. I can’t say everyone leaves with a smile, it doesn’t work out that way. You, for instance. You come in here OD’d and three, four hours after admission, you begin to lighten up. Sometimes they never wake up, Look, you pulling my leg? You write these hilarious best-sellers, from what they all tell me—what are you trying, to put me in one?”
HOW DID YOU BECOME AN EMERGENCY-ROOM DOCTOR?
Another nervous honk. “Monkey on my back,” he said, and then was seized by a shattering cough that seemed of itself to hurl him out of the room. A moment later Zuckerman heard him call down the corridor, “Where the hell’d they put the diabetic?”
Zuckerman had no idea how much more of the day had passed before Walsh appeared at his bedside again. He had something urgent to say, something to make clear about himself before he (or the writer) went back on duty. If he was going to wind up in a hilarious best-seller, Zuckerman might as well gel it right.
A book machine is what they see when they meet me. And appalling as it is, they’re right. A book machine consuming lives—including. Dr. Walsh, my own.
“Most every emergency-room doctor ! know has something on his back,” he said. “Alcoholism. Mental disorder. No spika dee English. Okay, with me it was Demerol. Percodan turns me off, morphine turns me off, even alcohol disagrees with me. But Demerol—it’s a good thing you didn’t find out about Demerol. It’s a great favorite with us folks whose pain drags on and on. Gives a lot of elation. Relaxation. No more problems.”
WHAT PROBLEMS WERE YOURS?
“Okay,” he said, his anger raw now and undisguised. “I’ll tell you, Zuckerman, since you want to know. I used to have a practice over in Elgin. A wife, a child, and a practice. Couldn’t handle it. You’ll understand that. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t understand that. So I got through on Demerol. Ten years ago this is. The big problem for me in dealing with patients is getting someone out of a difficult situation over a period of time. Down here in emergency, we jusi light the fuse and run. We put our Finger in the dike for a while and that’s it. But if a guy gets a tough case up on the floors, a case that goes on day after day, you’ve got to push the right buttons over the long haul. You’ve got to watch them die without falling apart. I can’t do that. With my history, and pushing sixty, I’m lucky I can do this. I work forty hours a week, they pay me, and I go home. That’s about all Gordon Walsh can handle. Now you know.”
But that sounded to Zuckerman like all a man could want, an end to the search for the release from self. After Walsh had left for the second time, he tried to imagine those forty-hour weeks in order to forget what was happening in his mouth. Car accidents. Motorcycle accidents. Falls. Burns. Strokes. Coronaries. Overdoses. Knife wounds. Bullet wounds. Dog bites. Human bites. Childbirth. Lunacy. Breakdown. Now, there’s work. They come in on the rack and you keep them alive till the surgeon can wire them together. You get them off the rack and then you disappear. Self-oblivion. What could be less ambiguous than that? If the dean were to say to him over at the medical school, “No, no room, not with your history, not at your age, not after the stunt you pulled out here,” he’d reply that he wanted only to be another emergency-room doctor with a monkey on his back and an exemplary record of doubt. Nothing in the world could make him happier.
It was dark in Chicago when the plastic surgeon arrived. He apologized for being late but he’d driven in through the blizzard from Homewood. He sewed him up right in the room, stitched him up from inside the flesh so there’d be nothing afterwards but a hairline scar. “If you want,” he said—a joke to lift the patient’s spirits—”we’ll take another tuck right here and nip that dewlap in the bud. Keep you young for the ladies.” Whether he was given a local anesthetic Zuckerman had no idea. Maybe everything just hurt too much for him to feel the stitching.
The X-rays showed a fracture of the jaw in two places, so the maxillo-facial surgeon was called down, and at about the dinner hour Zuckerman was wheeled into the operating room. The elderly surgeon explained everything beforehand—in the quietest voice, like the TV announcer at the tennis match, described for Zuckerman what was next. Two fractures, he explained: an oblique fracture at the front, a thin vertical line running from between where the teeth had broken off down to the point of the chin, and a second fracture up by the hinge, Because the fragments weren’t in a very good position running down to the chin, he’d have to make a small incision just beneath the chin to go in and get them aligned, then take very fine wire, drill some holes, and wire the bone together. Up by the hinge no surgery necessary. They’d put metal bars on his upper and lower teeth, crisscross rubber bands to hold the bars fastened together, and that’s all it would take to heal the second fracture and give him an even bite. He shouldn’t be alarmed when he woke up if he experienced a slight choking sensation—it would only be from the rubber bands cl
amping his mouth “more or less shut.” They would be loosening that up as soon as they could. And then, for the twentieth time that day, Zuckerman was assured that after his face was all fixed, he’d still be able to wow the girls.
“Yes, it’s a clean fracture, but not quite clean enough to suit me.” These words of the surgeon’s were the last that he heard. Bobby, there to administer the anesthesia, patted his shoulder. “Off to Xanadu, Zuck,” and off he went, to the tune of “… not quite clean enough…”
Bobby was there to put him out and was there in the recovery room to check up on him when Zuckerman came to, but when the Xylocaine wore off sometime during the night, Zuckerman was alone and at long last he found out just what pain could really do. He’d had no idea.
One of the maneuvers he adopted to get from one minute to the next was to try calling himself Mr. Zuckerman. as though from the bench. Chasing that old man around those tombstones, Mr. Zuckerman, is the dumbest thing you have ever done. You have opened the wrong windows, closed the wrong doors, you have granted jurisdiction over your conscience to the wrong court; you have been in hiding half your life and a son far too long—you, Mr. Zuckerman, have been the most improbable slave to embarrassment and shame, yet for sheer pointless inexcusable stupidity, nothing comes close to chasing across a cemetery, through a snowstorm, a retired handbag salesman understandably horrified to discover grafted upon his own family tree the goy who spoils everything. To fix all that pain and repression and exhaustion on this Katzenjammer Karamazov, this bush-league Pontifex, to smash him, like some false divinity, into smithereens … but of course there were Gregory’s inalienable rights to defend, the liberties of a repellent mindless little shit whom you, Mr. Zuckerman, would loathe on sight. It appears, Mr. Zuckerman, that you may have lost your way since Thomas Mann last looked down from the altar and charged you to become a great man. I hereby sentence you to a mouth clamped shut.